bone black

you know what love is

31.7.07

for the girl with the hairline warts

swelter, wizen, withersmiling all the way dryunfeeling enough to not cryto not shriekor peek at big eyed boysor play in unkempt afrosor lock ashy jointsor lick snaggle toothsor meet all the things you are cowering fromthe defects that draw you inand bay your baby loveimmaterial and 40 year old virgin immature12 years too soonits a long way downbut same difference when stuck on treizehere's to loving, then love,what loveto loveand love

5.6.06

Surge in Racist Mood Raises Concerns on Eve of World CupBy JERE LONGMAN, June 4, 2006

HAMBURG, Germany, June 3 — As he left the soccer field after a club match in the eastern German city of Halle on March 25, the Nigerian forward Adebowale Ogungbure was spit upon, jeered with racial remarks and mocked with monkey noises. In rebuke, he placed two fingers under his nose to simulate a Hitler mustache and thrust his arm in a Nazi salute.

In April, the American defender Oguchi Onyewu, playing for his professional club team in Belgium, dismissively gestured toward fans who were making simian chants at him. Then, as he went to throw the ball inbounds, Onyewu said a fan of the opposing team reached over a barrier and punched him in the face.

International soccer has been plagued for years by violence among fans, including racial incidents. But FIFA, soccer's Zurich-based world governing body, said there has been a recent surge in discriminatory behavior toward blacks by fans and other players, an escalation that has dovetailed with the signing of more players from Africa and Latin America by elite European clubs.

This "deplorable trend," as FIFA has called it, now threatens to embarrass the sport on its grandest stage, the World Cup, which opens June 9 for a monthlong run in 12 cities around Germany. More than 30 billion cumulative television viewers are expected to watch part of the competition and Joseph S. Blatter, FIFA's president, has vowed to crack down on racist behavior during the tournament.

Underlining FIFA's concerns, the issue has been included on the agenda at its biannual Congress, scheduled to be held this week in Munich. A campaign against bigotry includes "Say No to Racism" stadium banners, television commercials, and team captains making pregame speeches during the quarterfinals of the 32-team tournament.

Players, coaches and officials have been threatened with sanctions. But FIFA has said it would not be practical to use the harshest penalties available to punish misbehaving fans — halting matches, holding games in empty stadiums and deducting points that teams receive for victories and ties.

Players and antiracism experts said they expected offensive behavior during the tournament, including monkey-like chanting; derisive singing; the hanging of banners that reflect neofascist and racist beliefs; and perhaps the tossing of bananas or banana peels, all familiar occurrences during matches in Spain, Italy, eastern Germany and eastern Europe.

"For us it's quite clear this is a reflection of underlying tensions that exist in European societies," said Piara Powar, director of the London-based antiracist soccer organization Kick It Out. He said of Eastern Europe: "Poverty, unemployment, is a problem. Indigenous people are looking for easy answers to blame. Often newcomers bear the brunt of the blame."

Yet experts and players also said they believed the racist behavior would be more constrained at the World Cup than it was during play in various domestic leagues around Europe, because of increased security, the international makeup of the crowds, higher ticket prices and a sense that spectators would be generally well behaved on soccer's grandest stage.

"We have to differentiate inside and outside the stadium," said Kurt Wachter, project coordinator for the Vienna-based Football Against Racism in Europe, a network of organizations that seeks to fight bigotry and xenophobia in 35 countries.

"Racism is a feature of many football leagues inside and outside Europe," said Wachter, who expects most problems to occur outside stadiums where crowds are less controlled. "We're sure we will see some things we're used to seeing. It won't stop because of the World Cup."

Particularly worrisome are the possibilities of attacks by extremist groups on spectators and visitors in train stations, bars, restaurants and open areas near the stadiums, Wachter and other experts said. To promote tolerance, he said his organization would organize street soccer matches outside World Cup stadiums.

Recent attacks in the eastern Germany city of Potsdam on an Ethiopian-born engineer and in eastern Berlin on a state lawmaker of Turkish descent, along with a government report showing an increase in right-wing violence, have ignited fears that even sporadic hate crimes and other intolerant behavior could mar the World Cup, whose embracing motto is A Time to Make Friends.

Far-right extremism is isolated on the fringe of German society, and the German government has intended to confront its Nazi past while preaching openness and tolerance. Germany has one of the world's lowest rates of violent crime. Still, an immigrant group called the Africa Council said it would publish a "No Go" guide for nonwhites during the World Cup, particularly for some areas of eastern Berlin and for surrounding towns of the state of Brandenburg.

In mid-May, a former government spokesman, Uwe-Karsten Heye, caused a furor when he tried to assist visitors by advising that anyone "with a different skin color" avoid visiting small and midsize towns in Brandenburg and elsewhere in eastern Germany, or they "may not leave with their lives."

These remarks received blunt criticism from high-ranking German officials. Wolfgang Schäuble, the minister of the interior, said there were no areas in which World Cup visitors should feel threatened, calling Germany "one of the safest places in the world."

Angela Merkel, Germany's chancellor, has warned that "anybody who threatens, attacks or, worse, kills anybody because of the color of his skin or because he comes from another country will face the full force of the law."

The Bundesliga in Germany is one of the world's top professional soccer leagues, and has not experienced widespread racism. Incidents involving racial abuse of black players are more prevalent in semiprofessional and amateur leagues in eastern Germany. One of the cities playing host to the World Cup, Leipzig, is in the former East Germany. Another, Berlin, was partly in East Germany.

After making a Nazi salute, which is illegal in Germany, Ogungbure of Nigeria was investigated by the authorities. But a charge of unconstitutional behavior against him was soon dropped because his gesture had been meant to renounce extremist activity.

"I regret what I did," Ogungbure said in a telephone interview from Leipzig. "I should have walked away. I'm a professional, but I'm a human, too. They don't spit on dogs. Why should they spit on me? I felt like a nobody."

Gerald Asamoah, a forward on Germany's World Cup team and a native of Ghana, has been recounting an incident in the 1990's when he was pelted with bananas before a club match in Cottbus. "I'll never forget that," he said in a television interview. "It's like we're not people." He has expressed anger and sadness over a banner distributed by a right-wing group that admonished, "No Gerald, You Are Not Germany."

Cory Gibbs, an American defender who formerly played professionally in Germany, said there were restaurants and nightclubs in eastern Germany — and even around Hamburg in the west — where he was told "You're not welcome" because he was black.

"I think racism is everywhere," said Gibbs, who will miss the World Cup because of a knee injury. "But I feel in Germany racism is a lot more direct."

Racist behavior at soccer matches is primarily displayed by men and is fueled by several factors, according to experts: alcohol; the perceived "us versus them" threat of multiculturalism in societies that were once more ethnically homogenous; the difficult economic transition of eastern European nations since the fall of the Berlin Wall; and crude attempts to unnerve opposing players during bitter, consuming rivalries.

Other observers say that the soccer stadium in Europe has become a communal soapbox, one of the few remaining public spaces where spectators can be outrageous and where political correctness does not exist and is even discouraged.

"Nowhere else other than football do people meet someplace and have a stage for shouting things as an anonymous mass," said Gerd Dembowski, director of a Berlin-based antiracist organization called Floodlight. "You can shout things you would never say in your normal life, let out your frustrations."

Not all the misbehavior can be traced to fans or to Europe. Players and coaches have also been transgressors.

Luis Aragonés, Spain's World Cup coach, was fined in 2004 after making racial remarks about the French star Thierry Henry. In March, in the Brazilian league, the defender Antonio Carlos was suspended for 120 days, and 4 additional matches, after an incident in which he shouted "monkey" at an opposing player who was black. But it was an incident in Spain on Feb. 25 that galvanized antiracist sentiment and prodded FIFA into taking a tougher stand against bigoted behavior. That match, in Zaragoza, was temporarily halted in the 77th minute by the referee, who threatened to cancel the remaining 13 minutes after Samuel Eto'o, the star forward for Barcelona, was subjected to a chorus of racial taunts. Eto'o threatened to leave the field. His coach and teammates eventually persuaded him to continue, and last month Barcelona won the European Champions Cup.

Eto'o has become one of the sport's most outspoken players on the subject of racism. "I'll continue to play," Eto'o, whose national team, Cameroon, did not qualify for the World Cup, said this week through his agent. "I'm not going to give up and hide and put my head down. I'll score goals against the teams whose fans are making rude noises."

Under pressure to curb what it acknowledged was an increase in racist incidents, FIFA in late March announced a stricter set of penalties that would apply for club and national team matches. The sanctions would include suspensions of five matches for players and officials who make discriminatory gestures, fines of $16,600 to $25,000 for each offense and two-year stadium bans for offending spectators. It also said teams, which receive 3 points in the standings for a victory, would have 3 points deducted on a first offense by misbehaving players, officials or fans.

Blatter, the FIFA president, told reporters that the 3-point deduction for abhorrent fan behavior would apply during the World Cup, then backed away from his comments in April. Blatter declined to comment for this article. And it remains unclear exactly what penalties will be levied against World Cup teams for offensive behavior by fans, coaches and players.

Nicolas Maingot, a FIFA spokesman, said World Cup sanctions would be made public later. But in an e-mail response to questions, he said: "Only racist abuses in the field of play will be punished. For fans, it will be impossible, due to the multinationality of the audience. In other words, it would be impossible to identify from which side would potential racist abusers come."

Critics counter that spectators are supposed to have their names on their tickets, so identifying offending fans should be relatively easy.

Onyewu, the American defender who was punched by an opposing fan in Belgium, said the man was identified through an anonymous tip and was barred from attending matches for two years. He said he did not retaliate because he believed that racist behavior reflected acts of a minority of fans.

"I'm anticipating a more professional environment in Germany because it's the World Cup," Onyewu said. Even so, he said, although antiracist efforts could restrict public behavior, "that's only helping the exterior."

3.5.06

HOUSTON -- Prosecutors said Friday they won't seek hate crimes charges against two white teens accused of beating a 17-year-old Hispanic boy. Civil rights groups claimed there was no other reason for the attack.

Authorities said the suspects acknowledged they beat the boy but say it was because he kissed a 12-year-old girl. The teens claimed they were offended at the age difference between the victim and the girl, who also is Hispanic.

Detective Michael Weinel of the Harris County Sheriff's Department also said the youths were drinking, smoking marijuana and taking anti-anxiety drug Xanax.

"I don't know that the very beginning of the attack was racial," said prosecutor Mike Trent, "but there's no question that they were venting quite a bit of hatred in their hearts."

Authorities said the two teens dragged the boy into a yard, where they sodomized him with a plastic pipe from a patio table umbrella and shouted racial slurs.

Trent said the boy also had high levels of toxins in his organs, indicating the attackers may have poured bleach inside the pipe used to sodomize him. Doctors believe the boy passed out quickly and was unconscious for most of the attack.

Trent said that adding hate-crime charges to the aggravated sexual assault faced by David Henry Tuck, 18, and Keith Robert Turner, 17, would have no legal effect.

The victim remained in critical condition Friday. If he dies, the charge would be upgraded to capital murder because of the sexual assault, making Tuck eligible for the death penalty. Turner is too young to be eligible for execution.

Civil rights groups said Friday they wanted hate-crime charges.

"This clearly is a crime motivated by prejudice and bias against Hispanics," said Rick Dovalina, district director for the League of United Latin American Citizens. "No other reason exists for this crime to have been committed against this young boy."

Dovalina spoke at a news conference attended by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Coalition for Civil Rights for Immigrants. They said the would ask the Justice Department to intervene and would ask the state Legislature to raise the minimum penalty for a hate-crime from 5 years to 20 years.

On Friday, investigators revised some details of the attack, saying it occurred between 5 a.m. and 8 a.m. Sunday. The boy, whom The Associated Press is not identifying because he is a juvenile victim of sexual assault, was found between three and six hours later.

Instead of an unsupervised party, they said the only youths gathered were the victim, the two suspects, and two children who lived in the house. The adult tenant of the house apparently slept through the attack, Weinel said. Police also corrected the victim's age to 17, from 16.

Trent said the suspects, both of whom have juvenile criminal records, threatened the adult's children with harm if they cooperated with the investigation.

Tuck and Turner are being held without bond. Charles Hinton, Tuck's attorney, did not return a call seeking comment. It was not known whether Turner had an attorney.

SPRING, Texas (AP) -- Two white teenagers severely beat and sodomized a 16-year-old Hispanic boy who they believed had tried to kiss a 12-year-old white girl at a party, authorities said.

The attackers forced the boy out of the house party, beat him and sodomized him with a metal pipe, shouting epithets "associated with being Hispanic," said Lt. John Martin with the Harris County Sheriff's Department.

Prosecutors are considering whether to attach hate-crime charges, but unless the victim dies, the possible penalty would be the same. If the boy dies and it is ruled a hate crime, the attackers could face the death penalty, authorities said.

The case has been turned over to the homicide division, Martin said, normal procedure in severe assault cases.

Authorities set bond at $100,000 for Turner and at $20,000 for Tuck.

Spring is a middle-class, largely white suburb of 36,000 residents, located about 10 miles north of the Houston city line.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed

21.4.06

ON LANGUAGE'So to speak' and other verbal stutter-steps takenBy WILLIAM SAFIRE

DEFERENTIALISMS, if you will, are rampant.

"There seems to be a virus going around on television," e-mails Olivia Hugill, "that causes people to make a sort of verbal parenthesis and insert the term if you will. This may have started with V.P. Cheney, who is fond of the phrase, and now it's spreading unchecked. Could you do a riff on the subject so that we might ridicule it into permanent retirement?"

A riff is an oral or written improvisation, often comic, with the phrase or approach repeated so as to become a kind of signature; a second sense is "a variation on a theme." The word (possibly a clip of riffle) is most likely an alteration of refrain, because it is derived from a 1930s coinage describing a recurring musical phrase played by an inspired jazz soloist.

I don't do riffs; I do weighty stuff for a hyperliterate, persnickety readership. The subject Hugill raises was touched on in this space 15 years ago, as Americans picked up the British habit of emphasizing understatement. Today it deserves more profound treatment than a mere riff; it has to do with the kudzu-like creep of deferentialisms, on which I have been assembling a dossier in the years since.

The vice president, as Hugill notes, is a frequent deferentialist. Asked a couple of months ago about threatened congressional restrictions on the National Security Agency's surveillance program, he told Jim Lehrer, on the NewsHour on PBS, that "the possible amendment, if you will, to additional legislation" would be damaging. (One year ago, Cheney used the same deferentialism on the subject of Iraq: "I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.")

If you will is a shortening of "if you will permit me to say" or "if you will pardon my saying so," which is not quite what the clipped phrase means. The speaker or writer needs no such permission; on the contrary, the shortening means "I'm going to say this, and you may not like it, but that's just too bad, so here goes." The point is not to show deference, as the words say, but to make a pass at submissive respect while making a forceful point.

To Lehrer in the same interview this year, the embattled but unbowed veep used a variation about congressional critics who had been previously informed of the warrantless wiretapping: "We've had some members head for the hills, so to speak." Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, also employed the short form of in a manner of speaking: "The state of Louisiana's phased evacuation plan, which was revamped ... a year earlier, worked quite well," she told her Homeland Security committee. "Then, so to speak, the wheels came off."

In both cases, the speaker was using a familiar metaphor the last throes before dying, the wheels coming off before crashing and then seemed to apologize for the vivid word-picture or for the cliché. In Hawaii, Rosalyn Baker, a state senator supporting an anti-bedbug expenditure to protect the tourism industry, used the appended apology on a much less frightening metaphor, urging colleagues to "nip it in the bud, so to speak, before it becomes a real issue out here."

These verbal stutter-steps both call attention to the metaphor-cliché and simultaneously back away from it. They are the rhetorical equivalents of tugging at the forelock (difficult to imagine in Cheney's case) in a kind of uppity modesty, as it were.

And now to as it were, the clip of "as if it were so," with the subjunctive-mood were signaling "contrary to fact," or at least "not to be taken literally." David Hare, the British playwright of Stuff Happens, a fictional treatment of the buildup to the Iraq war, told a Times interviewer that "the terrible thing is that the two as it were benign characters in the play Tony Blair and Colin Powell ... both these men get mashed." In this citation, the deferentialism as it were acts as an adverb modifying benign, making that adjective slightly malignant, or at least less than "as if it were benign."

Rhetoricians have Greek names for phrases like as it were, so to speak and if you will, calling them metanoia or correctio. Professor Frederick Dolan of the University of California at Berkeley says that they are often "ways of ironically drawing attention to the fact that understatement is being used and so to the cleverness of the understatement (and understater)." I say that such deferentialisms are smarmily pretentious, not to put too fine a point on it.

Horror show

When Jill Carroll, a freelance reporter working for The Christian Science Monitor, was freed by her kidnappers in Iraq after three months in captivity, The Boston Globe reported that her first, cautious comments "evoked the horror of her experience."

The Latin horridus means "shaggy, bristling, menacing," and its many offspring send shudders through synonymists. The least scary is horrid, perhaps because of the Longfellow poem about the good little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead "But when she was bad she was horrid." It gets worse with horrible, often applied to accidents and weather and by Queen Elizabeth II to a year she called "an annus horribilis." More frightening still is horrific, with its emphasis boosted by the urgency of "terrific." Most solemnly alarming is horrendous, as in Bush's "evil men who want to use horrendous weapons," with the word gaining size from the similarity to "tremendous."

The novelist and linguist Anthony Burgess, in A Clockwork Orange, introduced horror show to describe the pleasure taken by cruel men; it was a sly play on the Russian word khorosho, meaning "good."

April 15, 2006Safire is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist of the New York Times, based in Washington, D.C.

“’Are Your Hands Clean?’ Social and Political Dimensions of the New Reproductive and Genetic Technologies”Presenter: Ruha Bengamin (Class of 2001) Founder/Member: SASSAFRAS Ph.D. Candidate, Sociology, Univ. of California-Berkeley

“Eugenic Practices on Black Women's Bodies”Presenter: Cara Page Committee on Women Population and the Environment

Breath Beyond Beyonce: Reclaiming the Sacred Self Cosby Room 214Facilitator: L’erin Assantwaa (Class of 2003)Explore archetypal images of black woman that are created and perpetuated by popular culture, specifically focusing on the way they have formed our self concepts as Black Women.

3:55 pm -5:10 pm Workshops 2

I Rhyme Like a Girl!! Cosby Room 214Facilitator: Toni BlackmanLearn to freestyle in a positive and nurturing environment.

Connecting Women for Peace Cosby Room 224Facilitator: Kristen Morehead (Class of 2002)In the “Women Connecting for Peace” workshop, we the participants are asked to allow ourselves to honor and strengthen our own innate ability to connect with one another as something powerful. Through participating in Sister Circles, we recognize that our stories, when shared intimately and directly, almost always lead to a sense of commonality rather than difference. We become aware that these connections are powerful components for transformational peace and supportive actions.

“Maroon Media for Sistahs” Cosby Room 217Facilitator: Thandisizwe Chimuringa Community Media Activist Founder of the Ida B. Wells InstituteAn examination of the role of media in the African American struggle for liberation. The workshop will provide hands-on introduction to grassroots radio technology and strategies for creating and distributing

3.2.06

Before the Battle (Chickin' Dumplin'), Kara Walker, 1995

"One of the things I find interesting about exoticism in the context of interracial sexual liaisons is that it is a kind of racism by mutual consent. Each party projects fantasies onto the other. If there is a solid basis to the attraction and a relationship is formed, the fantasy stage is transcended and one finds oneself dealing with the funky humanness of the other. Exotic differences are of no importance because one is dealing with the hard realities of another human being. Some people, of course, fetishize the idea of exoticism...

Curiously, just like the stereotypes some like to believe about themselves attraction based on exoticism also occurs among exotics. For example, the fetishizing of black women as the Queen Mums of Africa within romantic black cultural nationalist thought. Or, like the East Indian and Bavarian German woman with whom I had an affair some years back, who complained about how she was being treated like an exotic by all the white boys she had been involved with. Yet, at the same time, as she had never been involved with a black man, she projected her particular fantasies onto me."